I understand exactly what you're saying about the concept of having to buy votes not being appealing to serious authors.

However, @ocdb possibly might be the only way (short of flagging) of giving people that care about proof of brain a way to efficiently reward quality content authors (and get a curation return themselves) - forget the bots for a moment, you're never going to stop the top 1% of early adopters mutually upvoting their food pictures to >$20 as a well known British couple and their dutch friend do every single day.

And let's face it - no one wants to flag that friendship group, 'cos that's all it is, just crypto rich friends helping each other out, they're hardly 'bad people'.

So maybe @ocdb has a legitimate place to reward more serious authors given that we're probably not going to stop that kind of behaviour even if all the other bots disappear.

I get you though, using it is hardly ideal ethical action! Just a way of earning a few more quid, but NB if steem moons, then that's an extra $20-30 a post!